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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wrote the hypothesis post earlier in the thread. I’ll add a bit more.

Parents who send their kids to top-tier private high schools tend to have prestige jobs and degrees, thus they highly value educational pedigree - and why their kid is at a prestige private high school! They send the message to their kids that academics are very important and that they should work hard to attend the best colleges.

Parents who live in wealthy zip codes and who send their kids to public schools tend to have high-paying jobs that don’t depend on educational pedigree. Examples professions might be IT and sales. By way of the parents, their children believe that while school is important, it’s not most important. Thus, while they are good students, they’re not great ones, and see kids heading to prestige colleges as strivers, try hards, and overly invested in academics.

If that background is true, public kids with great college options may be reluctant to post their results. [/quote]

Could be. You also have the fact that at public high schools, there are many students how ARE great students -- they are very invested in academics and work extremely hard for top grades, and have ambitious college plans. But as public school students, they are less likely to have the extra hooks (legacy, donor) that private school students are more likely to have due to family background. Some might, most won't.

So if a student gets into Yale from a public high school, they are likely coming from a cohort of very smart, hard working kids, many of whom will have never had a shot at Yale despite being a smart, hard working student. And the thing that put the Yalie over the top could very well be legacy status or some other hook that to a private school student would seem normal but to a public school community feels unfair. Because, within the context of a public school with families of varying socioeconomic background, it IS unfair -- just working hard and getting good grades and being a standout in one or two extra-curriculars is not enough for admittance to a school like that, unless you have something extra. The one "extra" kids have control over is athletics, but even with that, we all know that money and background go a long way to making a kid a recruited athlete. All the other extras are totally out of their control.

Essentially, the Yale admit at a private is unlikely to know many if any kids who worked hard enough to earn admission to a top school but didn't get one, but the Yale admit at a public is not only likely to know such kids, but those kids are likely to be friends because they are going to have been in the same honors and AP classes and had the same approach to school. Not only that, but they may know people who were admitted to top schools but are choosing in state publics instead, for financial reasons, a decision that can be fraught and disappointing for academically-minded kids. That doesn't happen at privates -- you don't run into kids who are like "well I got into Williams but my parents convinced me to go with UMD because we're a donut hole family and they want to have money to send my younger brother to college too." But that absolutely happens in public.

There is less "inequity" in private because attending the school usually means your background is vaguely "equal" to other families at the school. No such screen exists for public schools and as a result college is a more complicated proposition and you see a really wide range of outcomes, many of them dictated by resources and access in a way that will feel (and actually be) unfair to the students themselves.[/quote]

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